Cannot Resume Seeding After HD Disconnected

[teknosmoker]

I just switched to Transmission, as the primary client I used for years (Azureus/Vuze) was blacklisted by one of my trackers. I was able to transfer all my years of torrents over to Transmission and have been pretty happy with it for the past week or so until....



I launched Transmission today (v. 1.92, running on Mac OS 10.5.8) without my external data drive turned on (accidentally). I keep my data & torrents on the external data drive.

As Transmission could not see the drive when it was disconnected, it created a new "Volume" of the external drive on the root level of my primary internal HD (and gave it the same name as the missing external HD) and began re-downloading many of my torrents!

In a panic to save my data & ratio, I "selected all" torrents in the Transmission window and pressed the "pause" button. I also pressed the "turtle icon" to switch my transfer speed to 0. I then reconnected & turned on the external drive where all the data is, but cannot get Transmission to see the original torrents/data that I have on the external HD.

I don't want to kill my ratio by re-downloading everything I already have on my data HD. The files are HUGE and this could kill years worth of work. Right now, everything is paused and 49 of my torrents have begun to re-download onto the volume that Transmission created on my internal/primary HD.

What should I do!!? Can anyone please help me?

Many thanks.

-teknosmoker

[teknosmoker]

OK - I resolved the problem by selecting all off the files in the Transmission window, right-clicking and selecting "Move Data File To...", then navigating to the location of my data files on the external drive. After that, from the Transfers menu, I selected "Verify Local Data" and Transmission began to re-associate the torrents in the list with the data on my external drive.

I hope this is of some help to anyone who may run into a similar problem!

[scooterbaga]

Same issue here. Except I have 160+ torrents. Is there any way to not manually restart each torrent? This is a nightmare.

[Ranko]

When you connect an external drive in OS X, it becomes a folder under /Volumes . When this drive is not connected, applications trying to find data will find an empty folder instead, and will simply recreate the folder hierarchy within /Volumes , with the data being stored on the boot partition of the physical boot drive.

If you reconnect the drive now after the application has created the new folder hierarchy, the drive gets assigned another folder due to naming conflicts, say the original was /Volumes/extdrv , the new one will be /Volumes/extdrv-1 , or something to that effect. As long as that folder prevents the disk from assuming it's proper name, the application will not be able to find the correct files, as it will always look in the folder it created.

The trick is to just close the application entirely without changing any paths or stopping torrents, open /Volumes in the finder using the go to folder command, delete the folder that was created. Best to unmount all external disks first, though, to avoid confusion. This folder should be entirely empty, save any links to fixed disks.

Make sure to empty the trash, reconnect the drive, then launch the application. The problem is almost always solved by this.

[wackyxaky]

Yeah, these fixes work well, but the real issue here is that there was no need to go through these hoops in previous versions of transmission. If the external Hard Drive was disconnected, an error would pop up and the seed/download could be paused or redirected to a new location. Reconnecting the hard drive would allow the files to resume seeding/downloading without a problem. Using the "move data file" and "verify local data" commands certainly is less intuitive. . .

[mickm]

I just got burned by this too. I was 35GB into a 37GB download when I needed to quit everything and restart. I paused the Transmission download, then quit and ejected the external drive. After the restart I started Transmission again but forgot to connect the external hard drive first. I'll try the above method, and hopefully it'll all work out and my ratio will be preserved. Sure wish there was a more user friendly way of dealing with this.

[supplant]

Incredible to realize that this issue still exists over 9 years later from the OP. I'm baffled that Transmission doesn't offer an option to easily reconnect a file that has been moved.

"move data file" and then "verify local data" is not working for me. Nothing happens. The file status bar remains grey with "Error: No data found!" message.

Searching the forums, I found a patch https://trac.transmissionbt.com/ticket/4537#comment:4 from this topic viewtopic.php?t=17751 and I have no idea how to open a .patch file.

Please advise. Thanks!

[supplant]

OK, I finally figured out a solution after a LOT of trial and error. As others have experienced, it is not easy to reconnect a file when moving data between hard drives. Below is my step-by-step tutorial:

1. Control click the torrent file, select “Move Data File to”. Select the folder where the torrent file/folder resides.
2. Transmission Menu bar > Transfers > Verify Local Data
3. Transmission window > Inspector button
4. Inspector Window > Transfer tab > State - Monitor checking existing data until it reaches 100%. This will take longer with larger torrent files.
5. Control click the torrent file > Resume Selected
6. Torrent status should turn green, meaning it has begun seeding.

[nickbii]

OK, I finally figured out a solution after a LOT of trial and error. As others have experienced, it is not easy to reconnect a file when moving data between hard drives. Below is my step-by-step tutorial:

1. Control click the torrent file, select “Move Data File to”. Select the folder where the torrent file/folder resides.
2. Transmission Menu bar > Transfers > Verify Local Data
3. Transmission window > Inspector button
4. Inspector Window > Transfer tab > State - Monitor checking existing data until it reaches 100%. This will take longer with larger torrent files.
5. Control click the torrent file > Resume Selected
6. Torrent status should turn green, meaning it has begun seeding.

It took me awhile to figure this out, but once you've done 1 and 2 the completion bar on the downloads turns yellow, and if you click the pause/unpause button once it will turn gray and a second time it will turn back to either blue or green depending on how far along the transfer was. I did those two steps, and Transmission froze for a good 10-20 minutes while it did something Transmissioney, they turned yellow, then I played around in the Inspector window after they turned yellow, but couldn't see a "Monitor" or "State" button, and then the pause/unpause button worked.

Almost everything is back to normal -- about 4 smallish torrents seem to have forgotten a GB or two of data and started redownloading themselves, but the other 29 are restored to seeding status.